Klaus Illi has been working on the theme of "breath" since the early nineties. His installations allow the space to breathe through the interplay of different
objects. In addition to sound aspects, the connected system and the similarity of the breath suggest social thoughts, but also make conscious our own breathing . With the first and last breath of
the finite processes, an existential dimension is always present.

The various aspects of Illis' work - breathing, seeing and cleaning - can also be brought together under the theme of "time".

Contemporary industrial elements are more or less visible components of his installations. The addressing of the machine can lead to the investigation of our Western
concept of progress and civilization, counteract our sometimes antagonistic everyday life, or be understood as a hymn to the machine.

Illis' work, even if it contains a great deal of industrial technology, revolves around the human being, the body and the psyche, the all-too-human, the social,
political, and historical. In this sense, they have grown out of a figurative-body-related understanding of art and a humanistic-enlightenment image of man.

They can be classified into the discourse of nature and culture, or extended into the tension between man - art - nature - technology.

"PNEUMATIC BREATHING-WORKS

All bodies, whether they are created artistically or not, relate to space in some way.

This is especially true of sculptural works, of course. Klaus Illi’s sculptures communicate with space as a function of their specific corporeality. His sculptures’
bodies represent a synthesis of interior and exterior because their materiality concentrates completely on a covering, skin or membrane that articulates a boundary between the interior space and
the exterior of the sculptures.

In the pneumatic installations body, space and time are combined to form a continuum. The body as substance recedes increasingly and air becomes the central
sculptural material. A dynamic system produces cyclical processes similar to nature, in which the rhythms of the apparently breathing objects evoke associations with elemental life-events. The
kinetic-acoustic installation is interactive, it reacts when the viewer approaches. For a certain period the system is in repose, a stillness that occurs in cycles, and this is just as important
an element of the installation as its movement. Beginning and end create an awareness of time and finiteness.

Industrial technology is an exposed and central element of the system: thus the link between technology and nature, and with it our concept of civilization and
progress, is addressed as a problem. A transformation process (change of pradigm) that may well be starting to develop in Western industrial societies is suggested in the Utopia of a symbiotic
relationship.

First of all, in a quite direct and spontaneous manner there is the shock of the first encounter with the rhythmically breathing objects. This cancels a merely
aesthetic mode of seeing and almost imperatively introduces one’s own corporeality as an element of perception and understanding: the fact that I breathe myself and exist only as a breathing
person involuntarily makes me part of the installation.

Nothing allows me to experience my isolation and involvement, the fact that I am bound to something external, more clearly than my breathing. I can be all the more
frighteningly aware of the existential dimension of this contradictory link at moments when I observe myself as a breathing person only in exceptional situations, in a comparable way: I can
observe my sensual perceptions, seeing, feeling, etc., i.e. I can distance them from myself and reflect about them. As a breathing person I am at the same time thrown back upon myself, and a
social being. The same is true as a speaking person. Breathing, that is living silence, the disposition to speak is concealed within breathing...

Finally I experienced the installation overall as a model of a social 'body', as a kind of fate- community: none of the breath objects is like another, each is
subject to its own rhythm and yet they are the same in their relationship to the space, in their dependence on space as a substance and on their "breathing" mechanism..."

"...Interior and exterior, body and space have a common rigid boundary in our thinking and speaking. At the same time experience with our own bodies and the
observation of all organisms teaches us that this boundary is in constant motion.

Klaus Illi seized upon this to make the yawning gap between experience and concept in the work-group "Atem" ("Breath") and to transform Esslingen’s Galerie im
Heppächer into a single breathing sculpture..."